How much should an academic specialize? It depends on what you’re trying to maximize. But if you’re trying to maximize your citations there should be an optimal number of academic fields or even subfields. Citation count is one way to measure an academic’s fame. You might try to maximize your H-index, which is a metric of quantity and quality of scientific output. There are other metrics such as the g-index, which weights highly cited articles more. But the H-index is pretty well known.
You don’t want to be a dilettante where you never really master the topic. That’s not a good way to gain recognition. But overspecialization has costs too. You can over work a topic. You can keep working on the topic after it is dead.
A recent article in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (no ungated copy) confirmed that at least for ecologists and evolutionary biologists there is an optimum amount of specialization. That makes sense. Unfortunately, they don’t tell us how many topics to specialize in. They do tell us that it doesn’t seem to make much difference for people with fewer than 25 papers. Or at least we can’t tell because they don’t have enough fame to measure.
The more closely related the specializations are the easier it is to write in all of them. But portfolio theory suggests that they should be quite different. I would imagine that people who study radically different topics within economics will have more interesting insights. Part of your fame comes from how interesting you are. More interesting articles get into better journals and get cited more. Moreover, if your research topics are very different it is less likely that both topics will become passé during your career.
Alas, I also don’t know how many different subtopics in economics an academic should have to maximize fame. I don’t have 25 papers yet.
A vaguely related paper on academic specialization:
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2009/12/academic_specia.shtml
"Specialization and the road to academic success" Belmaker, Cooper, Lee, and Wilman. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 10:8 (Dec.) 2010
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